Annie Dipert ENG*196 Dr. Bohrer
March 8, 2013
Final Essay Explanation

A Bed to Herself: An Explanation

For this assignment I had to rework my initial plan to merge two stories together, and I choose to do an imitation of “A Tell Tale Heart” by Edgar Allen Poe. I wanted to put a much different twist on the story, by making the main character an estranged and battered wife and mother. I knew that I wanted to imitate the short story with a woman’s prospective so I decided to look up why woman kill, their husbands specifically. Abuse came up several times. I felt like this related to the problems with domestic violence today, so that aspect made the plot more contemporary. I also wanted to make a somewhat somber plot, in the beginning and then slowly reveal how a broken woman goes mad. Her husband was the main catalyst in his own death. I hinted multiple times in my imitation that she was physically, emotionally, and sexually abused. The beginning the story is prefaced the morning after she kills her husband and then buried him beneath the floor boards, much like Edgar Allen Poe’s character did with the “old man” he murdered. She slowly goes more insane, and she ends up snapping in the end, like Poe’s character did. The comments she makes to herself after she kills her husband are almost self-satisfying, like she is content with the kill. I wanted to make the tone and mood just as eerie as Poe makes his short story. The only emotional change I made between the opposing characters was that Poe’s character felt somewhat guilty, and the main character in my story had a nervous breakdown, ripped up the floorboards, and turned into an emotional monster. This was a very interesting story to imitate, because I wanted to follow it closely, and have the same physical outcome. However, I wanted to affect the reader in a different way than